Regular SEO audits are crucial for maintaining your website’s optimization. They work the same way as regular visits to the doctor to maintain health and detect problems before they become serious. Checking for abandoned pages should be part of these audits.
This will prevent you from building too many and make it easier to deal with them. You can identify and fix orphan pages on your website using a few tools:
Google Analytics
- Google Analytics allows you to track the performance of your website and gather visitor information.
- Analyze customer behavior.
- We are monitoring the success of marketing campaigns.
- Check out the top sources for visitor traffic.
- Discover potential orphan links.
Installing Google Analytics is a must if you don’t have it. A complete list of URLs can be accessed by clicking “Behavior”, followed by “Site Content”, and finally “All Pages.” You will see a list with URLs with the lowest number of visits. The complete URLs are likely to be orphan links.
Frog Screaming
Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider will help you find orphan links from your XML sitemap file (Google Analytics) and Google Search Console. You will need to link Analytics and Search Console to the account.
You will need to go into the respective configuration windows. Check the “Crawl New URLs Found in Google Analytics” box under the “General”.
Go to “Configuration” and click “Crawl Linked XML SITEMAPS” under “Crawl”. Next, select “Crawl These Sitemaps”, and enter the URL of your XML sitemap.
Once you are ready, open SEO Spider and enter your website. Click “Start” to continue. Next, click “Crawl Analysis” and then “Configure.” Check the boxes for “Sitemaps,” Analytics, and “Console.” Start the Crawl Analysis and populate a list with all orphaned links.
Semrush
SEMRush’s Site Audit can detect orphan pages and tell you how to fix them. You will need to create a project to allow Site Audit to crawl your website if this is your first time using it.
After the crawl is complete, click on the “Issues tab” and select “Select an issue.” You’ll then be able to see under the “Notices” header if Site Audit discovered any abandoned sitemap pages or orphaned Google Analytics pages.
It would help you connect Google Analytics and Site Audit to access this check. Then wait several minutes. The first detects pages that do not have incoming links in your sitemap files. The second sees pages without incoming links in Google Analytics.
Not all pages are checked by the tool. You can view a list of URLs affected by check by clicking on its name. You can find solutions by hovering your mouse over the “Why and How to Fix It” section.
SEO Scout
SEO Scout provides a variety of tools that will help you optimize your website, including internal linking analysis. It can detect site pages with few or no incoming links. This could indicate to Google that these pages are low-value.
Select “Preset Filters” from the “Internal Links” panel. You will see several options, one being “Orphan Links”. Clicking this filter will show you the list of URLs that have the least number of incoming links. The bottom will show the ones with the fewest incoming links or none.
Link Whisper
Link Whisper is a WordPress plugin that helps you quickly identify orphan pages.To analyze every URL on your website, install it and click “Report”. The “Internal Links Report” will give you a list of all your pages.
It will also show each page’s many outbound, inbound, and inbound links. Select “Inbound Inter Links” to view URLs with the fewest inbound links. You can also use the tool to add internal links to other pages that link to the affected pages.
Yoast
Yoast SEO, another WordPress plugin, can quickly identify orphan pages. It will automatically collect these pages in a tab called “Orphan Content.” Clicking on the account will display a list of affected pages with links. You can also get internal linking suggestions from the plugin.
How To Fix An Orphan Page
Next, you need to identify the orphan pages on your website. Then, it would help if you decided how to address them. There are a few options, but the one you choose will vary depending on each page.
If It’s A Relevant Page, Link To It From Other Relevant Pages
You want site visitors to find the page if it is still relevant. This includes pages that don’t have any external or internal links. It can be integrated into your website’s structure through linking to it from related pages or content. Yoast, Link Whisper and SEO Scout can make recommendations.
If It’s An Irrelevant Page, Delete It
You can delete the page if it is no longer relevant. It should also return a status code of 404 or 410. Search engines will eventually remove them from their indexes and stop searching them. You could instead use a 301 status code if the page contains any incoming links. This would redirect the link to a different page on your website.
If you don’t need it anymore, another option is to archive your orphan page. You can still see the page and its contents, but it is removed from your live website recommended by digital marketing experts.
Optimize Orphan Pages To Improve Your Seo
Orphan pages, even though they are often accidental, can cause severe problems for your SEO and impede your efforts. But you can’t fix something you don’t understand is wrong. Routine SEO audits are crucial.
An SEO audit can help you identify issues and fix them immediately. You will save time and ensure success by staying on top of your tasks.
